Regarding the Indian cricket auction player auction, Bridgit at GrodsCorp finds the frivolous disposal of such riches in bad taste, given that countys still extensive poverty.

There is a guy in India who runs a little job called Reliance, and is building a house. It is about 16 stories high with seven of them for parking plus more for accomodating his 300 attendants. I suspect the very poor actually appreciate the cricket.

Thanks, too for the link. I’ve previously read the ‘how to talk to a skeptic’ article. I have to say it reminds me (perhaps it’s the title) of pamphlets by Bob Santamaria that they used to hand out at my Catholic High School about how to debate with the Communists (not forgetting the Protestants, of course). I’m just not swayed by a theory that explains away the ‘holocene optimum’ as a galactic cycle and then switches to another ‘long stretch’ theory (carbon+water-vapor feedback) on behalf of current anxieties. The convenience of this argument, to me, is a bit too much like Bob’s defense of Immaculate Conception.

I think many people who bother to look will find it hard to accept there’s enough of a threat even in current temperature records to call for a 70-90% carbon emissions cut.

Best wishes — Peter

As for the apparently disproportionate share of ML space awarded to the Apathetic ones, Ken is right that they’re in my folder and Ken’s. But ‘Ken’s’ in this case means a folder called ‘photoblogging’. In other words, he is supposed to be only looking for pictures, but gets sidetracked.

We’d generally prefer to offer well written posts canvassing both sides of an issue. Thus, if you know of a well written post putting the other side of the argument to Garnaut I’d really like to know about it. That mostly wouldn’t include bloggers like Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt, who for some reason think sneering and sledging makes a roolly roolly strong argument (although some lefties have similar techniques).

Your post certainly essays a substantive argument, although my own reading suggests that it’s misconceived (see, for example, http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/12/13/215043/37 ). Nevertheless, the argument deserves to be highlighted so that people can make up their own minds. Accordingly I’ll include it in Monday’s Missing Link Daily.

I admit it, I was lured out by the nude woman. Yeah, I wonder why too. All very incongruous.

See? I knew you’d say that. You have a point, though I’m not sure that it has much to do with the one that I was making.

Really?! Maybe I’m not scrolling down far enough…..

We pick what we think is worthy of highlighting. The Apathetic Youth couple has been writing some great stuff recently, especially material on topics a little different from what everyone else is writing. We don’t have a policy of sharing the mentions around so everyone gets their turn or something, it’s necessarily a subjective judgment.

Nico

You’re certainly still in the Google reader centrist category. However, Gilmae took over responsibility for that category a couple of months ago, and I suspect that he uses his own feed reader subscription set rather than the ML Google Reader one. It’s conceivable that his reader doesn’t include your blog. I’ll raise it with him and ask him to make sure that all the centrist blogs from google reader are also in his own feed reader. I certainly know from when I was reviewing the centrist blogs that I quite regularly found posts of yours that were well worth inclusion.

Faustus

Thanks for that.

For this one, it’s “What do you want me to do? LEAVE? Then they’ll keep being wrong!”